From owner-freebsd-questions Fri May 5 9:37:20 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from home.offwhite.net (home.offwhite.net [156.46.35.30]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6066837BB13 for ; Fri, 5 May 2000 09:37:15 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from brennan@offwhite.net) Received: from localhost (brennan@localhost) by home.offwhite.net (8.9.1/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA59619; Fri, 5 May 2000 11:37:09 -0500 (CDT) Date: Fri, 5 May 2000 11:37:08 -0500 (CDT) From: Brennan W Stehling To: Mitch Collinsworth Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: low cost consultant (?) In-Reply-To: <200005051629.MAA45752@larryboy.graphics.cornell.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG This was over 6 months ago. FreeBSD may have supported it, but that was not listed as a supported OS. Linux was listed, however, and I had to go with that. We really needed that autoloader as that workstation was where I worked and I had it pulling backups from all of the other servers on the network via nfs and smb and dumping the backup to tape. Doing that with another tape drive would have been very difficult since the other ones that claimed to have support in FreeBSD did not have the capacity or the speed of this Sony autoloader. But in the end, the autoloader did not actually work correctly. I had a seasoned Unix consultant come in to help me from time to time and he could not get it to work the way we wanted either. In order to get the drive to do exactly what we wanted we would have to use Windows NT and I was not about to put that on my workstation. Just another case where the hardware vendor will not take the time to create a driver or provide specs to *BSD developers since that user base is still too small. Brennan Stehling - web developer and sys admin projects: www.greasydaemon.com | www.onmilwaukee.com | www.sncalumni.com fortune: Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun. On Fri, 5 May 2000, Mitch Collinsworth wrote: > > >I agree that FreeBSD should not lose focus as a server OS, but if there > >were a larger user base we would find more hardware vendors working for > >FreeBSD users. I wish that every autoloader tape drive out there had a > >FreeBSD driver, but they hardly ever support FreeBSD. > > > >The last time I had to use a nice new autoloader tape drive I had to use > >Linux because it happened to have support while FreeBSD did not. > > > >It is all about the numbers for hardware vendors. > > Is your autoloader a scsi device? Don't most modern scsi autoloaders > conform to the scsi media changer interface standard at this point, > making custom drivers unnecessary? > > Maybe what I really should be asking is "How long ago was it when you > 'had to use Linux'"? Perhaps it was before the scsi media changer > interface standard came into common usage. > > -Mitch > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message